Learn the top reason why products fail

I’ve previously described the importance of nailing your customer’s problem as the initial battle. But it’s about way more than just getting their attention. When you can describe your customer’s problems clearly and succinctly – even better than they can, there is an automatic transference where they believe you also have the solution for them. This is what Jay Abraham calls the “Strategy of Preeminence“. This same phenomenon is also at work at the doctor’s office where after correctly diagnosing you, you are more open to the prescription.

This is a guest post written by Simen Fure Jørgensen. He runs a consulting firm, Iterate in Norway, and is the creator of a new board game, Playing Lean, that promises to teach Lean Startup principles.

I often get asked to weigh in on the age-old question of whether entrepreneurs are born or made? I believe that true entrepreneurs are born – not made. Startups are inherently uncertain and a lot like roller coasters. One day, you could be on top of the world, full of confidence, and believe that your […]

Last time, I showed you how to model a multi-sided business using a Lean Canvas. In this post, I’m going to show you get more specific and ballpark these types of business models to test if its a model worth pursuing.

Today I am going to show you how to model a multi-sided business using a Lean Canvas. Products like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube all fall into this category. Unlike a direct business model where your users become your customers, a multi-sided business model is a multi-actor model where your users and customers are distinct segments.

If you’re starting a company, chances are you can build a product. Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers. Justin Mares, Co-author of Traction shares lessons on when and how to pursue channel building while running lean in this guest post.

Last time I emphasized getting specific on your revenue streams – down to the customer segment, pricing model, and customer lifetime assumptions. If you don’t have a “big enough” problem worth solving (that’s not even plausible on paper), then why expend any effort on it. In this post, I’m going to show you how to use these simple inputs to ballpark your business model and test whether it’s worth pursuing.

I created the Lean Canvas back in 2009 as a way to more effectively document my most critical business model assumptions for my products which were predominantly SaaS software products at the time.

Lean Canvas is now taught at over 200 universities (including high schools), close to 100 startup accelerators, and used at hundreds of businesses (including large enterprises). We just crossed the 125K users and 175K canvases mark with our online Lean Canvas tool.

Keeping a locked knee (or a completely straight leg) is key for one-legged balancing yoga poses. A locked knee provides a solid foundation that keeps your foot grounded as you progress through the rest of the pose. I can’t help but draw a parallel to running lean where “locking your knees” corresponds to “tackling what’s riskiest in your business model”.

While you might be really excited by your idea’s potential, others don’t see what you see. What they see instead is something untested and risky. It logically follows that that you should prioritize tackling what’s riskiest, not what’s easiest, in your business model. But while tackling what’s riskiest is a simple enough concept to grasp, it’s ironically quite hard to put into practice.